Certain vehicles, such as agricultural vehicles (e.g., harvesters, combines, tractors, agricultural implements, etc.) and construction vehicles (e.g., bulldozers, front-end loaders, etc.) for example, are used to perform work on ground surfaces that are soft, slippery and/or uneven (e.g., on soil, mud, sand, ice, snow, etc.).
Conventionally, such vehicles have had large wheels with tires on them to move the vehicle along the ground surface. Under certain conditions, such tires may have poor traction on some specific types of ground surface and, as these vehicles are generally heavy, the tires may compact the ground surface in an undesirable way owing to the weight of the vehicle. As an example, when the vehicle is an agricultural vehicle, the tires may compact the soil in such a way as to undesirably inhibit the growth of crops. In order to reduce the aforementioned drawbacks, to increase traction and to distribute the weight of the vehicle over a larger area on the ground surface, track systems were developed to be used in place of at least some of the wheel and tire assemblies on the vehicles.
Such conventional track systems designed for agricultural vehicles typically have elastomeric endless tracks. The endless tracks have traction lugs projecting from the track carcass to increase traction on different ground surfaces. However, when the track system is driven over snowy or icy surfaces, the endless track may lack traction and/or slip on such surfaces.
Known solutions exist to enhance the traction of an endless metallic track over snowy or icy surfaces. For instance, grouser assemblies may be selectively attached to metallic endless tracks. However, it is difficult to directly transpose the grouser assemblies designed for metallic endless track to elastomeric endless tracks because of the physical characteristics of the materials that compose the endless track. For example, because of the flexibility and resiliency of the carcass of an elastomeric track, a grouser assembly that was originally designed to be attached to a metallic endless track, which is much more rigid, may be more prone to move about or slip relative to the outer surface of the elastomeric endless track under certain conditions, such as when the vehicle is driven over steep terrain. Such movement of the grouser assemblies on the endless track may mitigate the enhanced traction provided by the grouser assemblies and may lead to damages to the endless track and/or the vehicle.
Therefore, improvements to grouser assemblies for elastomeric endless tracks are desired.